Download Tools You Own

Tools You Own
Maggie Moehringer
AIRPO, June 2006
Why Use a Tool You Own
 It’s “free” (or cheap).
 It precludes a survey, product learning curve an
evaluation.
 It precludes having to go to bid.
 Comes with SUNY ITEC and campus support.
 It will do:
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Not buying features you don’t need and won’t use.
Not counting on “bleeding edge” features.
 Products do improve over time.
“Tools”
 In the “Business Intelligence” arena
 Oracle Discoverer
 Oracle Discoverer Viewer
 Oracle Warehouse Builder
 Oracle HTML-DB (“Application Express”)
 Oracle 10g OLAP/BI
 Hyperion “SQR”
 Hyperion “Performance Suite”
“Own”
 For Oracle products:
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Participate (pay, are recharged) for ITEC
“Oracle License and Support”
All State-Ops except for Cornell, Optometry,
Forestry, Purchase
Half of Community Colleges.
“Own”
 For Hyperion Products:
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For “SQR”:
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Banner campuses
Anyone who owns “Hyperion Performance Suite”
Some others
21 State Ops and 16 Community Colleges.
For Hyperion Performance Suite:
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10 State Ops
5 Community Colleges
“Business Intelligence”
 “Business intelligence (BI) is a broad
category of application programs and
technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing,
and providing access to data to help
enterprise users make better business
decisions. BI applications include the
activities of decision support, query and
reporting, online analytical processing
(OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and
data mining.”
“Business Intelligence” Tools
 Extract, transform and load data (ETL tools).
 Build data repositories geared to
query/reporting/analysis (e.g. inquiry-only
databases, stars, OLAP cubes).
 Document data with metadata (data about
data) and user views.
 Query data repositories.
 Analyze the data in repositories.
 Format reports.
 Make reports available (portals, etc.).
“ETL” and “Build” Tools You Own
 Oracle Warehouse Builder
 Hub of Oracle BI Suite
 Specify data source files and target files
 Sources: databases, flat files or applications
 Targets: Oracle database tables (dimensions and
cubes included)
 Specify transformations and mappings
 Keep all the specifications in a metadata repository
 Generate relational and dimensional table creation and
data load “scripts”
 Re-use the metadata in other Oracle BI Suite products
(Discoverer, etc.).
“ETL” and “Build” Tools You Own
(con’t)
 OWB Advantages:
 Documents your design and procedures in one place.
 Makes that design available to drive other Oracle
tools.
 Generates “error free” load scripts.
 Ease of maintenance.
 Used in Banner ODS/EDW products.
 OWB Disadvantages
 A “DBA” tool, not an “Application Developer” tool.
 Learning curve, overhead, maintenance and support.
 You can do many of the things it does yourself.
“Metadata” Tools You Own
 A little here, a little there.
 Not done well or comprehensively anywhere.
 OWB: documents data, data transformations
and repositories.
 Discoverer: can hold definitions and userfriendly features such as code expansions
and select lists.
“Query” Tools You Own
 Query:
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Enter data selection parameters, pull off a
result set.
Rudimentary formatting.
Export facilities (Excel, e.g.).
 Oracle Discoverer:
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A perfectly adequate query tool.
Doesn’t do much more.
OLAP capabilities at the 10g level.
Query Tools: Oracle Discoverer
 Typical query capabilities:
 Enter parameters and selection criteria
 Drill
 Sort
 Pivot
 Chart
 Format headings, footers, fonts, etc.
 Desktop and Internet clients
 Can be an end-user tool with training
 Interfaces are not Oracle’s forte.
Query Tools: Hyperion’s SQR
 A powerful query tool
 Also a powerful “presentation quality”
reporting tool
 Not good for most end users; SQL based
 Data manipulation and updating capability
 Nice development toolset for developers
 Web reports and distribution/management
facility (portal)
 Many Banner campuses currently use it.
Analysis Tools:
 Hyperion Intelligence
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Query, analysis, and presentation tool
Sophisticated development tools
Decision support tool and OLAP processing
support
“Dashboard” interface builder
Web and client/server support
Needs developer effort.
 Oracle Discoverer – 10g
Report Formatting Tools
 You own Oracle Reports, an improving facility.
 SQR
 Perhaps our weakest link
 Inexpensive surrogates, e.g. Crystal Reports.
Distribution Tools
 We own Discoverer “Viewer” (Plus) – Web users can,
through their browser:
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View available queries
Enter any parameters the query requests
Sort, drill, pivot
Cannot change the basic query
Interface can be customized
System Office will be using to distribute Discoverer
queries to the campuses.
 Hyperion products have distribution components.
A Development Tool We Own
 Oracle “Application Express” (formerly known
as HTML-DB):
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Easily creates Oracle tables from, e.g., Excel
spreadsheets
Supplies an easy development facility for
simple or complex web access to the tables
Easy for programmers to learn and use
Distributes data that might be captive in
desktop applications.
Questions?
 Maggie Moehringer
Director of Information Services
SUNY System Administration
(518) 443-5438
[email protected]